BEZWA project working on full speed
Our BEZWA project (Building European Zero Waste Academy), which started at the end of last year, is moving towards its most exciting phase – live training events in Slovenia and Belgium in September. Due to well-known virus we have moved our Zero Waste Ambassador training from June to beginning of September, but we are still hoping it can happen live in Slovenia. The Zero Waste Trainers training is scheduled to happen in the of September.
The main aim of the project is to develop two training formats – Zero Waste Ambassadors and Zero Waste Trainers. The first focusing more on how to bring the zero waste knowledge and tools to the municipality level, the second dealing mainly with how to teach zero waste topics better. That is why we are organizing the two pilot training events this year – to test our concepts and see how they work. In order to get a diverse “testing group”, we opened the applications for anyone interested in these topics in Europe. We were pleasantly surprised to see so much interest – more than 100 people applied for both trainings! This really makes us confident that there is a need and room for these types of capacity building formats and these two trainings are just a start.
In the end of May we hosted our first webinar with the participants of Zero Waste Ambassadors training on how to be an effective learner, hosted by our educational expert Grete Arro from Tallinn University. After getting to know this bunch of people from 16 different European countries, we cannot be more excited to meet them in real life and dig deep into the essence of zero waste. The Zero Waste Trainers participants are yet to meet in our first webinar on July 1st.
But there is more! Besides creating a toolkit on how to apply this training format in your own community (publicly available by mid-2022) our second big aim is to build a network of European zero waste professionals, both the Ambassadors and Trainers. We are developing a certification system to show the qualifications of people who have undergone our training formats and gathering them into a public database on Zero Waste Europe’s website. In the future we hope this will be the place to find credible and certified experts on zero waste across Europe.
Stay tuned for more news later this year!
